The White House will lift sanctions imposed on Turkey, President Trump confirmed during the NATO summit, after a bilateral meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The penalties, enacted under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), were triggered by Ankara’s purchase of the Russian S-400 missile defense system.
The decision comes despite consistent Pentagon assessments that the Russian system is incompatible with NATO equipment and poses a security risk to the American-made F-35 joint strike fighter program. The expulsion of Turkey from the F-35 program cost the U.S. defense industrial base an estimated $9 billion in lost manufacturing and supply chain activity, directly impacting American workers at facilities in multiple states.
“This administration is choosing to prioritize a transactional relationship with a foreign leader over the concrete economic interests of the American defense worker,” said a congressional aide familiar with the discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The signal sent to the defense industry is toxic.”
During the summit, the president characterized Turkey as “much more loyal than other countries” in remarks to reporters, a framing that sidesteps Ankara’s military operations against U.S.-allied Kurdish forces in Syria and its ongoing occupation of northern Cyprus. No public explanation detailed how lifting sanctions serves the domestic American workforce or remedies the security breach posed by Russian hardware embedded in a NATO member’s defense apparatus. The administration has not clarified if defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, lobbied for or against the sanctions relief. A Lockheed Martin spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.
The policy reversal raises immediate questions about the durability of sanctions as a tool to defend U.S. technological sovereignty and protect the domestic industrial base that supplies allied militaries.